“My dear Steerforth, what is the matter?”

“I wish with all my soul I had been better guided!” he exclaimed. “I wish with all my soul I could guide myself better!”

There was a passionate dejection in his manner that quite amazed me. He was more unlike himself than I could have supposed possible.

“It would be better to be this poor Peggotty, or his lout of a nephew,” he said, getting up and leaning moodily against the chimneypiece, with his face towards the fire, “than to be myself, twenty times richer and twenty times wiser, and be the torment to myself that I have been, in this Devil’s bark of a boat, within the last half-hour!”